(no subject)

[moon_custafer]

When I was a kid, even though I generally enjoyed movies and plays, I always felt a sense of dread going into one, and left to my own devices I probably would have backed out. When I was in my twenties, I began to have trouble making myself read fiction — at the time, I thought it was a reaction to having majored in English; that *having* to read books had taken some of the joy out of it; but now I think that fear of being trapped in the audience and not being able to escape the story had begun to spread to the page as well. Since then, I occasionally go on a narrative binge, but I find more and more that I can only bear to read things like how-to guides or recipe books, in which there is no emotional conflict and no characters. This makes me feel like a hypocrite, because I was such an enthusiastic reader as a child, and because I still attempt to write stories myself. I just can’t deal with exposing myself to the pain of fictional narratives, though. When I read to escape I want to escape from emotion completely, not into other emotion.

Comments

[batwrangler.livejournal.com]

After my mother died, I couldn't watch or read things like murder mysteries or police procedurals (even the mildest ones) because the thought of the suffering the families of the fictional deceased was going through was way too overwhelming. I won't watch the Hunger Games movies because reading the books was hard enough, and I nearly always bail on the kinds of comedies where it is clear people are going to get into trouble (kid disobeys parents & gets in trouble, for example) or end up embarrassed. This is all to say, you are not alone in finding narrative fiction uncomfortable and unfun, though you seem to have it to a greater degree.